Stone & Wood - Pacific Ale (Version 2) - Tasting Results/Review

Unfortunately we failed to capture any photos of this finished beer, because to be honest, we simply blew through the keg too fast. We were quite surprised when the tap started pouring foam and straight gas, and we were certainly disappointed it had run out. Perhaps a testament to the improvements we made this time around compared to our first attempt at making this beer, we went through it pretty fast and enjoyed every bit doing so. It's still not as close as we'd like to the original, and we did make a few notes though that we'll go through below.

In terms of appearance, to the naked eye it was pretty similar to our first attempt and was still a bit too dark/golden when compared to the original version. Especially when you can get a fresh glass of Pacific Ale from a tap at a pub, it has this almost green tinge to it - most likely from huge amounts of dry hopping.

Our latest version was still a touch too bitter - the IBU's from the recipe (26) were higher than the 22 IBU's stated by Stone & Wood, so this was expected and needs to be dialed back just a touch, though perhaps an even bigger dry hop could help to balance this out a bit more. Even with a 100g dry hop, it still seemed to lack that tropical fruit "punch" you get with the original, so a bigger dry hop will be in order next time around.

No doubt the water chemistry plays a really big role in how this beer works - particularly the chloride to sulfate ratio. In our first attempts we've had a heavy amount of sulfate and low amounts of chloride, which we think is accentuating the bitterness and giving it a certain sharpness and bite that the original version doesn't have. Like with Hazy IPA's, we think the chlorides should be increased and sulfates decreased, with a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio of chloride to sulfate respectively to give it a softer edge and remove that harshness.

Bumping up the chloride should allow for an even bigger dry hop - we're thinking 200g as a starting point, which is double what we used in this most recent attempt. A significant dry hop like this may also help contribute to that green tinge we previously mentioned.

This beer was still really good, we certainly enjoyed it but there are definitely still some adjustments and improvements to make to get it closer to the real thing. It's been fun working through this, and we'll probably have a 3rd attempt at brewing it by making some more adjustments later in the year, and will update this post with links to the respective recipe and brew day.

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Munich Helles - BrewZilla Brew Day (from Hell)

Our latest brew day for our Munich Helles recipe was one of the more challenging ones we've faced for sometime. Although nothing major or catastrophic happened, it certainly didn't go as smoothly as most of our previous brew days, although this can certainly be attributed to some new equipment and processes we (attempted) to implement. Here's how it went.

Grains, hops and BrewZilla ready to go

We started things out in the usual fashion with our mash and sparge water adjustments. These types of beers is don't typically require big adjustments (assuming you're source water is decent to begin with) and will usually contain low amounts of the key minerals we normally look at when brewing (like chloride, sulphate and calcium).

This was our first brew with our new KegLand RAPT Bluetooth thermometer. We're not particularly interested in it currently for it's bluetooth or logging functionality, bur rather for it's long probe so we can more accurately monitor our mash temperature from the centre of the grain bed. We had our strike water set to 69°C so we would hopefully hit our 65°C mash temperature target after doughing in with our grains.

69°C strike water temperature

Speaking of doughing in - we managed to accidentally spill some of the grain when adding it to the strike water, which seemed innocuous enough at the time, but was perhaps an early indicator of things to come. Although thankfully our mash temp was spot on 65C after adding the grains which was nice.

65°C mash temperature - spot on after adding our grains

After doughing in, we always leave the grain bed to settle for 10 minutes before taking our pH reading, so we used this time to make the pH adjustments to our sparge water. Anything under 5.6 is generally considered acceptable, so 5.57 is a pass.

After waiting 10 minutes we took our mash water sample and after chilling in a bowl of ice water we had a pH reading of 5.47. We probably would have preferred a bit closer to 5.3, but as long as we're in that 5.2-5.6 range then we're good.

We then setup our adjustable sparge arm featuring the sergeant sparge head and began recirculating the wort for the 60 minute mash period.

After the 60 minute mash time we raised the temperature from 65°C to 75°C for a 10 minute mash out. We then lifted the grain basket out of the BrewZilla and began sparging using our new integrated sparging setup. Unfortunately we don't have any photos of this during the brew day as this is when things began going a little sideways....

Here's a photo from my testing of the setup so you can hopefully see what we're talking about. We're using our Spike Flow pump to pump our sparge water from the Digiboil (pictured below on the milk crate) into the sparge arm on the BrewZilla instead of manually sparging by pouring into a glass jug, which is then subsequently poured over the of the grain bed for rising the grains of any residual sugars.

Picture from our integrated sparge water pump setup

Although this setup did technically work, there were a couple of key problems. Firstly, we burned through our sparge water super fast - we always do extra sparge water just in case, and we only knew that we'd gone through it all when the pump started to run dry!

The next problem was that the sparge water had gone straight through the grain bed meaning we had massively overshot our pre-boil volume. Using the sergeant sparge head here we suspect was part of the problem as the spray pattern shoots to the outside which likely caused the water to trickle down the edges of the grain bed and basket, rather than through the grain. This means we didn't extract anywhere near as much sugar as we normally would. So we ended up with too much volume and not as much extracted sugar from the grain as we expected from the recipe.

Taking the pre-boil gravity reading was confirmation that things had not worked out with a worryingly-low 1.034 gravity reading - a full 10 points lower than our recipe predicted.

Pre-boil gravity reading was disappointingly low at 1.034

Although bitterly disappointed at this, we desperately wanted to press on and salvage whatever we could from this, so we re-adjusted our recipe by increasing the boil from 30 minutes to 80 minutes. We boiled for the first 20 minutes and then added our first hop addition and treated it like a typical 60 minute boil from there. The increased boil time would help evaporate more of the water, leading to slightly less volume, but a higher original gravity (OG) for fermentation.

We also decided to add 220g of dextrose to help increase the fermentable sugar in the wort as we were still going to be a little low for the style, even with the increased boil time. After making some adjustments to our recipe in Brewfather it predicted we could hit our 1.044 original gravity by doing this. Let's go.

Saaz hops as dictated by the recipe

Measuring our the Saaz hop addition

We measured out and added our 60 minute hop addition with 41g of Saaz hops.

We then measured out our 5g of yeast nutrient and our half whirlfloc tablet which were added to the boil with 10 minutes left.

Yeast nutrient measured out along with half a whirlfloc tablet

We also added our 220g of dextrose with approx 10 minutes left in the boil

Dextrose to the rescue

With 5 minutes left we added our final charge of Saaz hops before attempting to chill down the wort, which brings us to the next issue we faced.

For this brew we attempted to use our new counterflow chiller, and although we tested this beforehand, we for whatever reason were unable to get the BrewZilla pump to pump the wort through the chiller - it just didn't seem to be strong enough.

Troubleshooting this was a bit stressful since our wort was still well over 90°C and was therefore creating more bitterness than we wanted, and we also had to be careful with disconnecting things that we didn't end up getting sprayed with boiling hot wort. In the end we gave up, quickly grabbed our stainless immersion chiller and cooled the wort that way.

Our final gravity reading was a pleasing 1.045 - bang on what our adjusted recipe had predicted which was quite a relief, and will hopefully mean a still decent beer is to come!

We chilled the wort to around 40°C before transferring it to our Apollo Titan fermenter and left it in our fermentation fridge overnight to chill down to pitching temperature (13°C) before adding our two packets of W34/70 yeast.

So, as we previously mentioned, things certainly didn't go smoothly for us, but we still ended up with what will hopefully be a decent wort and finished beer. We've certainly learned a few lessons from this one and were pleased we were able to adapt on the fly to help salvage what we could from this one.

We had fermentation activity within 24 hours of pitching the yeast, and after fermenting at around 13°C we steadily increased the temperature after FG was reached over several days for a diacetyl rest before cold crashing for around 48 hours and pressure transferring to a keg.

Want to see how this one turned out? Check out our Munich Helles Tasting Results & Review post

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Beer Line Foaming - Troubleshooting Guide

We recently faced a situation with our Hard Seltzer that had been working perfectly in our kegerator system for a couple of months. In a previous post, we outlined the setup we used to adjust for the increased carbonation level of the seltzer, with significantly more carbonation and serving pressure being used compared to beer.

All of a sudden one day, the seltzer started pouring as nothing but foam. Not foaming as it left the tap and arrived in the glass, but rather coming out of the tap already as foam. Looking at the line itself coiled within the kegerator, we could see foaming, or gas escaping out of solution in there before it had even reached the tap. 

This was puzzling as nothing had changed within the kegerator at all when it started happening. We hadn't adjusted anything, or even changed a keg over, it literally started happening completely out of nowhere.

If you start researching beer (or seltzer) foaming issues from a kegerator, you'll come across the same solutions repeatedly - over carbonation and not having your system or lines "balanced" but these solutions didn't apply for our scenario since it had been working perfectly for several months with our increased line length and flow control disconnect.

We spent more time than we'd care to admit changing disconnects, lines and attaching different things to different kegs to try and isolate the problem. We eventually settled on the problem being with something related to the keg itself, and after much researching we finally found a thread on a homebrewing forum for someone who experienced a similar problem which ended up being caused by a faulty dip tube seal on the keg ball lock liquid post. Our kegs are a couple of years old now and we've never changed the seals so we figured this was a worthwhile thing to try - after all, o-rings for keg dip tubes and ball lock posts are pretty cheap and easy to come by from most homebrewing shops so we figured it was worth a shot.

Undoing the ball lock post from the keg is thankfully a really simple process - with a 17mm spanner being all that's required to undo the post. Unscrew it and remove it, but be careful not to let the spring and poppet fall out and go missing from the post once you remove it. The dip tube can now be pulled out and the o-ring is accessible.

Liquid ball lock post o-ring

Dip tube o-ring with dip tube slightly lifted

We changed the dip tube o-ring as well as the actual top o-ring where the ball lock disconnect goes and this fixed our issue. We carefully inspected the seals before doing so, and to our eye they looked fine, but there was obviously a defect in there somewhere that caused this to happen.

Our guess would be the o-ring on the post itself, rather than the dip tube as this is more susceptible to damage and wear and tear from the repeated connecting and disconnecting of ball lock disconnects. In any case, it was apparent that a leak in one of the o-rings was letting air into the beer lines which was causing the foaming to occur.

It's important to be patient when putting things back together and testing. Since we obviously had to purge the keg of all pressure prior to pulling the post off, this would have caused some foaming within the keg, so after reconnecting everything and pressurising the keg again, we waited a couple of hours for things to settle before doing some test pours which were thankfully foam free!